Where the Light Falls (2 page)

She stretched on the floor while he drank his coffee in bed; she could still bend her body along her legs easily, folding herself in half like a soft doll to grasp her feet with her hands. In the middle of winter she cursed when her muscles tightened and she couldn't sit on the ground in the splits.

Watching her, he understood; was it for the first time? Or did the realisation grow, coming to him gradually, the words repeated in his head until it slowly became something he knew? He'd never thought it possible, to have this feeling of being in love without also feeling that he was also losing part of himself.

She came back to bed and spooned him, her skin cold against his warmth. She had done this often at night when he lay awake, worrying. Lately that was often. He was thirty-seven and his existence was still precarious; he lived from exhibition to exhibition. The basic anxiety about whether he would make enough money to survive was constant, although there was more of a market for his work in Europe and his income more reliable since he moved to Berlin. On those nights when he couldn't sleep, Dom talked him through his fears, reassuring him that, no matter what, they would find a way through. She was more generous to him than he'd ever been to himself.

The upcoming show in London was causing him many sleepless nights. He still needed one standout photograph, an image that would make people take notice, and would bring him the important acquisition of his work he needed. He was so desperate for this exhibition to be a success that he was sure it was bound to end in failure. Things had gone badly before—he'd had exhibitions from which he hadn't sold a single print—but if this show didn't succeed he would have to reckon with failure at a whole new level. London was an important market and this was his first real break after almost a decade of trying.

For many years in his life, he'd only had to worry about disappointing himself, but now, with Dom in his life, the stakes were much higher than they'd been before. Maybe he felt he could only expect her to love him when things were going well, that the successful version of him was worthy of love, but the failure would never be.

Andrew rolled over and he was so close to Dom's face that he could see the freckles on her nose, diffuse and delicate, although her skin was dark. Her father, whom he'd met many times, had migrated to Germany from Ghana before she was born, although her mother was born in Bremen and her skin was a bluish white. Dom was a combination of the two.

He pulled the sheet up over them as they lay together and the light around them was gauzy and white.

‘Did you sleep okay last night?' she asked, looking up at him. His arms were around her, one under her neck. Her body flush against his. When they lay together like this, he sometimes thought he could feel the faint throb of her heart through her skin. But perhaps it was only his own.

‘Okay,' he said.

‘You got up at one point and turned on the light?'

He nodded. ‘Yes, I couldn't switch my mind off.'

‘Were you worrying about the exhibition in London again?'

‘No, it wasn't that.'

In truth he had been thinking about Kirsten, fighting off memories from the past that had no place here, in his life with Dom. But the more he tried to banish those thoughts, the more intrusive they became. There was something about his relationship with Kirsten that felt unresolved. In the years before he left Sydney, she had seemed increasingly troubled. Still he'd kept seeing her; he felt he couldn't stop. Kirsten was more addiction than attachment. In the end, the only way to free himself from her was to leave Sydney, to cut her from his life. But he had been too afraid of hurting her to tell her this directly.

‘I was thinking about the friend from Sydney who went missing. There was something about Stewart's email that made me think it must be serious. I don't think he'd bother to contact me otherwise. I'm sorry I woke you.'

‘Don't be sorry,' she said and she pulled herself away a little, still looking into his face, as though this distance would help him too see how much she empathised with his concerns.

•

They rose and slipped into their jeans and took their heavy coats from the hangers. The fabric of his coat was stiff from being worn for too many winters and the material hung heavily from his body like the skin of a bear. They walked hand in hand to the café around the corner and slipped onto a bench seat, sitting side by side, their thighs pressed together. Over breakfast they hardly spoke. Their best exchanges, he often thought, were wordless, when all they shared between them was a mood. Dom sat absorbed in
Die Welt
while he flicked through
Der Spiegel
, seeking out the few articles in English. He ordered muesli and it arrived with gooseberries on top and they burst between his teeth, their flavour bright and unusual.

Afterwards, they walked through Mitte together, down Alte Schönhauser Allee, drifting in and out of shops, the same shops they always went into, a path they often took, following a set of footprints they had laid many times before. Around him were the familiar fixtures of concrete, a landscape of grey with sudden eruptions of graffiti on the walls. These streets and lanes
had become familiar to him, a pattern that now held a shape in his brain and he walked through this area with the feeling that he belonged.

•

That night they went to the exhibition opening of a friend of his. Outside the cold had turned sharp. The severity of winter was always a shock, a long dark tunnel of black nights and scantly lit days. He reminded himself that it was the last day of January and in a month winter would start to lift.

They took the U-Bahn to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, walked past the Volksbühne theatre and the Babylon cinema, and waited on the street to be buzzed into the gallery. He looked down through the lower window and saw people already milling in the basement. The light was orange and sparse, as though the room was lit by embers. Berlin was a place in which you needed to know the right doors to pass through and it came as a sudden surprise, standing there, to find himself in a position of knowledge.

Inside the gallery, Dom stood in front of him with her back pressed against his chest. The colour was the first thing he noticed about the paintings, thick reds, oranges and browns, autumnal colours across the canvas, warm but with the sense of approaching darkness. The images started to take shape, landscapes, loosely formed
hills and trees, and the colours made them look burnt. They were scenes of a world that was ending.

They moved between the canvases and other people in the gallery turned and looked towards them. He began to wonder if they were standing too close to the work, or moving against the current of people. It took him some time to understand that there was a sort of jealousy about their gaze, that Dom and he shared something between them that these people envied. There are occasional moments when you love someone and you are aware of it, and there in the gallery he felt that small, bright miracle taking place between them.

But then their friends arrived—some were people Dom knew, others had studios in the same building as his—and the awareness passed, moving off behind him and into his wake. They stayed and drank and talked. No-one felt they needed to say anything complicated or profound. They spoke of things they had spoken of before and would speak of again. There was a simplicity to their conversation, a warmth and an ease.

When they left the gallery a rain had started, icy wet drops that weren't quite snow, falling on the ground around them with a lisp,
thsst, thsst, thsst.
Later, in bed, they slept naked together, sharing the warmth of their bodies against the chill of winter that was slipping through the gaps in the blankets.

•

The next morning, he drove Dom to the Hauptbahnhof in the old car she'd had since she was twenty-five. It was a small car and they sat with their knees pressed up against the dashboard. They were quiet together. In these moments after waking, his thoughts took some time to catch up to his movements.

It was 7 am and Berlin was still dark, the streets empty. He didn't park at the train station, but dropped Dom at the entrance. She leant across to kiss him and her mouth was warm on his.

‘The next two weeks will be a bit full on, but I'll call you whenever I can,' she said, extracting herself from the small car.

As he drove away he watched her in the rear-view mirror as she wheeled her bag into the station, until she got smaller and he turned out onto the autobahn and could no longer see her.

•

He drove straight to his studio in Mitte. The large room was still and cold. He turned on the heating and sat down with his back to the wall, listening to the trickle of oil. He stayed there for what must have been an hour, but his mind was no longer on Dom and Berlin. He was thinking about Kirsten and Sydney. He had been born in Sydney and had lived there for most of his life, but he hadn't been back to visit in almost two years, not
since his last exhibition. He hadn't seen his mother in as long.

It was a city that belonged to a different era of his life, a period of struggle. It was a time in his life characterised more by failure than by success, when he woke each morning and told himself,
Keep going
. Those were the words he repeated to himself in the face of every adversity, of failures and setbacks that would have caused most people to quit.

There were successes. Enough at least, to make him persevere—the sale of his work to important institutions, grants to fund the making of new work—but the more success he had, the more the rejections burned. Five years ago, an influential gallery in Melbourne had scheduled an exhibition of his work, but when they saw the photographs he'd taken, they politely declined to show them. It was the greatest disappointment of his artistic career, the only moment he'd stopped and wondered whether he could keep doing this. It took him about a year before he could think about making new work. And now he suffered from the anxiety that the gallery in London would do the same thing.

Around him, his studio looked temporary, furnished only with what was necessary. He had taken over the lease from a Canadian painter who had moved back to Montreal shortly after Andrew arrived in Berlin. There were only a few personal items in this space: an old aluminium lamp he'd bought second-hand at a market and now used as a reading lamp. And there was the old Rolleiflex his father
had given him for his tenth birthday: the first camera he had ever owned. It sat on a shelf, the lens cap lost, its eye permanently open. He took that camera with him wherever he went, although it was old, scratched and dented and no longer of any real use to him, not for the type of photographs he took now. It took the world and flattened it; in its lens the world lost its depth. But the Rolleiflex was his one tangible record of his father. And it reminded him of the things in life he wanted to hold on to, of the camera's ability to take the world, collect its images and store them securely in its black and airless cavity.

In his studio that morning he could do no work. He was too distracted by his thoughts about Kirsten. Even after they'd stopped living together, their relationship had continued, on and off, for almost ten years. In those years he'd told himself that what was happening between them was only sex and that he could end it whenever he wanted. It wasn't until he'd left for Berlin that he really understood her power over him. She was a woman who, as long as he had known her, had had a flicker of panic in her eyes, the look of a person who fears they are drowning. He wanted to understand what had happened to her and, sitting there in his studio, he realised that he would have to return to Sydney in order to do so. In fact, it occurred to him, the timing was ideal. His mother had been dropping hints recently about wanting to see him again. He could visit his mother and find out what had happened to Kirsten without having to involve Dom in the whole
messy business of why he'd left Sydney. He could be back in Berlin by the time Dom returned from Cologne.

•

He left that afternoon, packing his suitcase with all his clean clothes and his camera, just in case he saw something in Sydney that appealed to him.

At the airport, while he was waiting at the gate for his flight to be called, he called Dom's mobile. It was late in the afternoon and the light was becoming thin and metallic. She would have arrived in Cologne by now. But the call went straight through to her voicemail. He opened his mouth to speak then closed it again and ended the call. He wondered how Dom would react when, later, she heard this empty message on her phone. He imagined her pressing the phone to her ear and hearing nothing but static, like the sound inside a shell.

3

In the aeroplane, he had no awareness of movement. With the window shades down and the lights dimmed, the plane felt still, as though suspended from a cord in mid-air, like a mobile over a child's bed. Time was distorted around him. He slept deeply most of the way to Sydney and woke before they landed to find his breakfast laid out on the tray in front of him, sealed in plastic and foil.

He had used his frequent flyer points to buy the flight, which meant a four-hour stopover in Bangkok between connecting flights, during which he'd managed a snatched conversation with Dom. He'd told her the reason for his trip and that he'd be back in Berlin the day after her. She had wanted to know why it was so important for him to find out about this woman.
But he wasn't sure he could explain it yet, even to himself.

‘I love you,' he said.

‘
Ich dich auch
,' she replied.

•

When the plane landed in Sydney, he shuffled along behind the other passengers. He moved awkwardly through the customs hall, teetering forward as he took the escalator down to the baggage carousels. After so long on board the plane, sleeping and flying against time, it took him a while to become aware of his own edges again.

After being out of the country for so long, hearing the Australian accent again made him bristle, the way the voices floated, uninvited, into his head. Two women behind him were discussing whether or not to go back and buy another bottle of duty-free vodka and the man beside him was asking the customs officer whether he should declare the chocolate he'd brought back with him from Switzerland. People became an amplified version of themselves when they travelled, their good and bad qualities turned up a few notches.